No Easy Verdict on Thompson The Lawyer

Such views were shaped earlier in his career.

After graduating from Vanderbilt University law school in 1967, Thompson worked briefly as a federal prosecutor. He gained fame in the early 1970s as the 30-something lawyer who helped Republican Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee pursue Richard M. Nixon's misdeeds during the Watergate hearings. He then returned to Nashville to open a law firm.

In the late 1970s, he helped Marie Ragghianti sue to win reinstatement to her job as chairman of the Tennessee Parole Board and back pay in a scandal that exposed a parole bribery scheme that ultimately ended the career of then-Gov. Ray Blanton. The case was featured in a book and a movie.

Shortly before returning to Washington as a senator, Thompson helped the widow and son of a Marine who was killed when a blade came off a helicopter. The family was unable to sue the Defense Department, so Thompson went after the helicopter maker and won a settlement.

During his 1994 Senate campaign, Thompson ran on a staunch anti-crime platform that called for keeping repeat offenders in prison, enforcing the death penalty, abolishing parole and getting tough on juvenile offenders. That image was burnished in recent years by his role as no-nonsense district attorney Arthur Branch on the popular "Law and Order" TV show.

But earlier in his life, Thompson challenged the right of government to compel testimony or search property, according to a review of hundreds of pages of court filings, transcripts and contemporaneous news accounts.

In August 1981, Thompson, on First Amendment grounds, urged the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down an Illinois village's ordinance designed to protect children from marijuana by requiring merchants to get a license to sell drug paraphernalia or pro-marijuana literature. His client was a trade association of merchants who sold smoking goods, novelty items and magazines.

The justices unanimously disagreed, upholding the ordinance.

Thompson also lost a federal appeals case involving two defendants in a major drug case. In his appeal, he derided a U.S. Customs officer as "inexperienced" and tried to challenge that officer's right to search a boat on which 28,000 pounds of marijuana was found. The appellate judges disagreed, writing a detailed opinion supporting agent's right to search the boat.

At the Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association's annual meeting in 1980, Thompson suggested that more lawyers should consider having clients invoke their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination by refusing to testify before federal grand juries.

"We are to the point that I start on the assumption that my client will not testify and I have to be convinced that he should," he said.

Most of the time, Thompson's legal work earned him favorable headlines in his home state. In 1985, however, he was rebuked by a local judge for missing a drug defendant's trial to go on vacation in Paris, giving the client grounds for appeal.

The judge said he was "astonished that a lawyer with his experience and record would go traipsing off to Europe.

"Some lawyers need to learn that their personal plans aren't the only things that count in this business."

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.